[ATrpms-users] NVidia issues

[Neil Bird]

   Ever since I upgraded to Fedora 8 a few weeks ago, I've been having 
issues with nvidia drivers (the long version involves doing the upgrade in 
between kernel release and ATrpms nvidia kmdl release such that I couldn't 
get a matching pair, ending up installing the raw install from nvidia, yes 
the worst thing to do under the circumstances).


   Anyway, the nvidia stuff's all cleaned out and reinstalled, but I'm left 
with two issues, one of which is liveable with, the other more of a pest:


1) I don't now seem able to have more than one nvidia version resident for 
my kernel.  I *can* have them installed, but nomatter what I do I always get 
the oldest (highest by string name) actually resident.

   E.g., I have 96.43.05 and 169.09 installed.  Even after 
'nvidia-graphics-switch 169.09', the nvidia module loaded (automatically 
from boot, mind, not by X) seems to be the 96.43.05 one.  If I unload it, 
and manually try to load the new one, I get a 'no such device' error, which 
to my mind means that the /dev entries are somehow tied to the other version.

   My modprobe.conf is being updated, symlinks I've checked are also 
changing and the udev business creating the /dev files doesn't seem to care 
anyway.

   If I uninstall the 96 one, then it works OK.

   Annoying, but liveable;  any hints as to the issue welcome, though!


2) My main issue is of heinous 2D performance in many circumstances, most 
notably xterm and gvim.  3D seems to be OK (the CPU seems hammered by xgears 
and the RSS jobbies, but I think that's normal?).  They certainly don't 
*appear* sluggish (glgears default size 11,500 fps) even at full screen 
[although some RSS thing's killing X with, I believe, the latest driver, but 
that's another issue].

   If I have gvim at 132x40 chars on a 1600x1200 screen, and maximise it, I 
can *see* it redrawing the background;  it can take a second or two.  It was 
nothing like that on F7.  Similarly, 'visual bell' on xterm with lots of 
text can be ~½ second or more for each redraw, which gets painful *very* 
quickly.

   gnome-terminal doesn't seem to really suffer, and I've not noticed 
anything else *obviously* slow (e.g., firefox), so I'm not sure what to look at.

   Are there any generic X diagnostics I can run to see what it might be?

   (I suffered the same slow-down when using the raw nvidia install straight 
after the upgrade, so in fact I don't think it's specific to ATrpms; 
possibly it's even something still lying around from that abortive install, 
but I did delete all '*nvidia*' files and a couple of others that looked 
iffy before reinstalling the RPMs.)

-- 
[neil at fnx ~]# rm -f .signature
[neil at fnx ~]# ls -l .signature
ls: .signature: No such file or directory
[neil at fnx ~]# exit